Who's Winning Tourism?

Tourism is a fun subject to study, but it's not equally spread out amongst the world

I recently stumbled upon some fun data from the United Nations that showed where people were traveling to in 2018. Obviously all of this data changes for the duration during the pandemic, but it’s still very interesting to see. Trends in travel inform so much and, depending on how many tourists your country might get each year could make or break your economic outlook (i.e. more money!).

The map above shows the total amount of international tourists each country gets (barring the many that the U.N. didn’t have data for) and, really, the data shouldn’t prove to be all that surprising. The United States and China pull loads of travelers as well as Europe, particularly France and Spain which get the most total travelers over all. Mexico and Turkey also perform pretty well overall. Fun data to visualize, certainly, but otherwise pretty expected.

But this map supposes that all countries are equal. That Iceland, for an example that will prove useful later, is on the same level as the United States. The reality is that they’re not equal. Iceland’s population is roughly 0.1% of the United State’s. So how do we compare them and take relative population size into consideration? Easy! Let’s compare them on a per capita basis!

Taking Population Into Account

Now we can see which countries over perform when it comes to tourism. The data is still not perfect, but we can at least visualize which countries might be more reliant on tourism for their economy and which probably don’t rely on it at all.

So let’s take a look at Iceland, once again, because I think it’s in a very unique situation. Overall, Iceland gets about 2.4 million international tourists per year. Not a lot all things considered. However, their population is only a little above 300,000 people. It’s a small country (population wise)! For every 1,000 residents who live and work in Iceland, they have almost 7,000 international tourists. The United States, now a paler shade of green, has merely 241 international tourists per 1,000 resident. That difference impacts their economy considerably as tourism supports multiple levels of jobs and contributes heavily towards any given country’s economy.

And we see this trend elsewhere too. The Caribbean nations, for example, all have outsized tourism as compared to their resident population. India does not, at least on the international level. Without knowing exactly, I would wager St. Kitts and Nevitts economy is very dependent on international tourism whereas India’s is not. India does likely have a lot of intra-national tourism, however.

Intra-national Tourism

DATA CAVEAT: I could not find a single state-level dataset for visitors. Sot his data needs to be caveated as much as possible. I had to crawl through multiple state travel and tourism websites to find these numbers, but more often that not they weren’t associated with any sort of methodology. I’ve done my very best to ensure accuracy, but I can’t vouch for 100% accuracy.

Alright, with that out of the way, again, we see the total amount of travelers for each state. This includes both international travelers and visitors from out-of-state and stay overnight at least one night. So Californians who visit Las Vegas, for example.

Like with the global map, we see relatively few surprises here. California and New York lead the way. Florida, Illinois, and Washington state are all expected as well. Georgia was a little surprising to me, but I just don’t know enough about their local economy. Texas also seemed a little low to me, but again, I don’t know. At the end of the day though, this data doesn’t really give us any useful information because we can’t compare one state to the next. California’s near 40 million population and multiple big cities does not make for a fair comparison to Oregon with 4 million people and really just the one big-ish city (Portland). So let’s take a look at that here:

Now we can start to see some interesting trends. California, while having the most tourism in general, doesn’t perform as well as say Idaho. Washington D.C. is also now more fairly represented, which I think makes sense given its the country’s capital with all the pomp and circumstance that entails. Two interesting states that stand out to me though are: North Dakota and Hawaii. For North Dakota, I just can’t imagine what is going on there. Even for a relatively low population state, there just doesn’t appear to be much there for people to travel to. Hawaii stands out for the opposite reason. I was definitely expecting more visitors to Hawaii. Granted the logistics of getting there would be a challenge.

Oregon

And because I’m from Oregon, of course I wanted to look more deeply into my home state. I won’t spend too much time here though.

Basically, we see the same similar trends as we do with the national and global maps. The counties with the most populations appear to do the best in attracting overall tourism. This would be Portland’s Multnomah and Washington counties, Eugene’s Lane county, and Bend’s Deschutes county. Not at all surprising.

But in looking at population, we see that actually it’s the Oregon coast counties that perform the best on a population level. This makes sense because these counties are within a couple hour drive away from Portland and pull heavily from that metro region. Same can be said for Hood River and Wasco county in the gorge. Wheeler county was the most surprising to me until I saw that the population for that county is only about 1,400 people in total and that it’s also home to the Painted Hills, one of Oregon’s most striking landscape features.

Money, Money, Money

And then just to illustrate some of the economic parts of what I’ve been talking about in this article. Here’s some data on how much money is spent by tourists for each resident who lives there. We can see the county’s that do well on a per capita level, tend to also do well overall in the amount of money they are theoretically able to spend on each resident. That’s obviously not how it works, but the idea holds true that Clatsop county, Tillamook county, and Lincoln county are drawing in more outside dollars to benefit their own communities than say Clackamas county, which has probably ten times the population. Multnomah county, home to Portland proper, likely brings in more money overall despite having relatively low tourists per population because tourists are simply spending more money on shopping, eating out, and lodging and events.

Again, tourism is a super interesting subject to dive into. There are a hundred ways to parse this data. This is just my approach. I wish I could find better data on individual states, but I’ll work with whatever I can get. Thanks for reading!